Читать книгу Sacrifice - Stephen French Whitman - Страница 15

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In the music room some musicians were playing a waltz; but Lilla and Lawrence Teck were walking on the terrace.

She said to herself, "This is a dream"; for she had come to believe that only in dreams did one realize, even in faint counterpart, one's deepest desires. She stood still. The world—this new world drenched in an unprecedented quality of moonlight—gradually became distinct. She gave him, through that veil of silvery beams, a long look of verification.

As in his picture he seemed at once rugged and fine, resolute and gentle. He was very quiet, like one who has willed to be so; but a certain shyness remained in him, and presently announced itself to her. Whereupon, remembering that she was beautiful, and that her beauty had a way of troubling men, Lilla felt her own timidity transmuted into joy.

"Are your jungles better than this?" she asked.

"The charm of my jungles overlies a welter of stupid cruelty and deadly waste. Would it surprise you to know that I should like to see all the world as nobly ordered as this landscape?"

She did not grasp the meaning of the words, being too deeply occupied with seizing upon those syllables, those living tones, and dropping them one by one into the treasury of her heart.

Glancing down at the aquatic garden, he remarked:

"These three basins would please my Mohammedan friends, who like to see their flowers inverted in still water, like a mirage come true."

"Yes, no doubt they have their ideals."

"And often dream of them in very pleasant places."

He described certain gardens of the East. He made her see nests of color unexpectedly blooming in the midst of deserts, behind walls of sundried mud overgrown with Persian roses, and with airy pavilions mirrored in pools that were seldom darkened by a cloud. Under date palms the white-robed Arabs sat smoking. From time to time black slaves brought them coffee flavored with ambergris. After sundown, at the hour called "maghrib," when the sky was turning green, having performed their ceremonial ablutions, they prayed.

"For what?"

"Behind the formal words? Who knows? For whatever they desired most. Probably for something that nobody would suspect."

"And the women?" she ventured, looking at him sidewise.

In those remote walled towns they still remained invisible. Their minds, restricted to puerilities, had never grown up. Their bodies were so lax that their short weekly promenade to the cemetery exhausted them. Seated on cushions, they spent their time listening to cuckoo clocks and music boxes, smelling perfumes, putting their jewelry away in caskets, then bedizening themselves all over again. Their servants, who had known in childhood the hurly burly of caravanserais and slave markets, told them of a world where everybody was possessed by a thousand devils of ingenuity and wit. And those scented ladies with feeble flesh, hollow eyes, and the brains of parrots, after listening for a while in vague regret, all at once became bored. Whereupon they fell to playing parchesi and eating sweetmeats.

In such sheltered and languid lives Lilla seemed to perceive a similarity to her own life. Or, at least, she felt that her life, if he knew it in detail, would seem to him almost as trivial.

"Poor souls," she said. "But one surely finds others out there," she persisted, unfurling her large fan of yellow plumes, and looking at it intently. "White women, for example, the women of the empire builders? At such meetings, in those far-off places, romance must be almost inevitable. Each finds in the other an overwhelming congeniality? The loneliness round about exerts a tremendous persuasion?"

"Oh, yes," he assented, with a smile. "Especially if the lady smokes a pipe."

He told her of an Englishwoman whom he had met in the Masai veldt, hunting for maneless lions—an amazon in breeches and boots, at the head of her own safari. Week after week she had led her dark-skinned retainers through the wilds, cheerily doctoring them in their sicknesses, herself never ailing or weary. At the charge of a lion she had withheld her fire till the last possible moment. By night, the safari encamped, she had sat before her tent in a folding chair, one knee cocked over the other, a pipe between her teeth, listening to the gossip of ragged wanderers who had been attracted by the firelight and the smell of burning fat.

"I find such women incomprehensible," Lilla declared, with a profound animosity to that huntress whose body was so strong, whose nerves were so sound, whose courage had been proved in the face of charging lions, who took life without a twinge and doubtless gloated over the blood that she had shed.

Lawrence Teck, after a moment's struggle with himself, blurted out:

"I assure you that when we fellows dream of women it's of a different sort."

"Oh, of course. Of the one that you've left behind, I suppose."

Sometimes, he assented presently; in which case the one at home would be immensely enriched by that wide separation. But it often happened that such an exile, when no specially congenial woman had given him her heart, constructed from his imagination an ideal, a vision capable of brightening the wilderness with the most exquisite charms. Or else he might find an unattainable ideal ready-made. Thus it was that uncouth sailors, on long voyages, treasured the photographs of unknown actresses in fancy costume, as a religious devotee might treasure an ikon. Or thus a soldier in some Congo fort, while gradually succumbing to the malefic spell of the encircling forests, yearned toward the portrait of a princess that he had clipped from an old illustrated magazine—toward a divinity whom he could never know, but whom he adored because her nature and life were so different from his.

"How romantic men are!" she exclaimed, turning away her head.

He seemed abashed; but he returned:

"And are women never tempted to renounce that famous practicality of theirs?"

She walked on along the terrace. The moonlight intensified her ethereal aspect; and nothing could have been more emphatic than the contrast between her seeming fragility and his apparent strength.

At a recollection she walked more and more slowly, her pace according with the faltering of her heart beats. But it was in an almost indifferent tone that she inquired:

"You are really going back to Africa day after to-morrow?"

"Yes, everything's settled."

She paused, staring across the gardens, watching the slow withdrawal from that scene of its peculiar charm.

"Why are you returning?"

He hesitated. Well, he had reason to believe, he said, that not far north of the Zambesi there was an unmapped, ruined city similar to the stone city called Zimbabwe, which adventurers from Phoenicia were supposed to have built four thousand years ago, as a mining town of the fabled Land of Ophir. Who knew what ancient idols, what Himyarite inscriptions, what trinkets of gold, might not be found there?

"How can such a matter be important enough to make you risk your life amid deadly fevers and insects, venomous reptiles, wild beasts and wilder men?"

In that respect the expedition would be tame. The journey into the interior would consist of undramatic drudgeries and discomforts, of association with a primitive folk whom he had never failed to make his friends, of precautions that would confound the reptiles, the fevers, and the disease-bearing insects. As for the wild beasts, they asked nothing better than to be left alone.

"Oh, yes," she assented, trailing her fan along the balustrade, "a hero must be modest on such points. Yet it seems to me an abnormal vanity that drives one into those places, just in order that one may say, 'It's I who have found a new pile of ruins, a few scraps of gold, in a jungle.'"

After a moment's reflection, he confessed:

"I gave you my secondary reason, because I thought you might find it more interesting than my chief one."

It was true, he said, that he hoped to find a new Zimbabwe there; but his principal task would be to make a geological survey of some territory believed to be very rich in certain minerals. He was going for a group of capitalists who, if he brought back an encouraging report, would obtain large concessions for exploiting the land. It was a gamble; the territory in question was virtually unexplored. That region, moreover, was peopled by a tribe opposed to exploitation, and, for that matter, even to visits from their white-skinned nominal rulers. But he had always been successful in dealing with savages; so, since this was to be as much a diplomatic mission as a geological survey, he had seemed the one for the task.

From this explanation she derived the idea that he was not a rich man, that perhaps until recently he had never thought of money as important, but that now, for some reason, he had determined that his fortune must be increased.

The waltz had ended. The dancers were appearing on the terrace. Some, descending the staircases between the pools, wandered away through the gardens. Here and there a match flared up against unnaturally tinted foliage. Farther on, a spangled dress shimmered beside a fountain, then, accompanied by a dark shadow, disappeared into a charmille. A clock in the valley struck eleven, its last vibrations mingling with a laugh that rose, through the moonbeams, from a marble kiosk enveloped in flowers. And as the breeze, heavy with the fragrance of many blossoms, caressed her face, Lilla felt that the gardens must be full of hidden persons each of whom had at last found the amorous complement.

At the end of the esplanade, in the light of the French windows, Cornelius Rysbroek's face appeared, then drifted away.

"What is that fellow's name?" asked Lawrence Teck. "Just now he wanted me to take him along to Africa. He seemed quite unhappy, especially when I had to tell him no. Indeed, he gave me a rather curious impression of misery and recklessness. What is it? An unfortunate love affair?"

"So it's that," she vouchsafed, staring at him intently, "which starts men off to the wilds?"

"Sometimes it's that which brings them back from the wilds. I could give you an instance——"

They, too, were now descending the steps between the pools.

The leafy alleys, silvered by the moon, and redolent of flowers that had been made magical by the alchemy of night, surrounded them. They came to a spot where a circular wall of foliage, rising behind stone benches, hemmed in a fountain, above which a marble antique warrior was lifting in his arms a marble girl, who struggled against that seizure with a convulsive energy, while her upturned face wore a look of happiness. Lawrence Teck made the comment:

"It appears that a rather primitive Greek gentleman has found a nymph bathing in a pool. If I remember, mortals who tried to capture nymphs were liable to die."

"Yes," she assented, staring at the upturned face of the captive. "He should not have tried."

"But no doubt it's hard for them to be reasonable at such times, especially when the person that they try to catch seems so strange, yet so overwhelmingly congenial—the embodied dream."

"Then she should have prevented him."

"Perhaps she tried to, with the usual success when it's a question of love in opposition to fear."

Lilla turned aside, drawing a cloud of golden tulle around her slender shoulders. "Does that acuteness also come to one in the jungle?" She seated herself upon the nearest stone bench. "What is that story of yours?"

"A story of one of those sentimental exiles and the picture of his ideal."

The man, he said, had found the picture in a tattered magazine in the Afrika Hotel at Zanzibar. Of all the thousands of fair faces that he had seen depicted or in the flesh, it was this face whose peculiar beauty clutched suddenly at his pulse. But it was not so much the physical beauty that exerted the spell; nor was it, in this instance, the attractiveness of the incomprehensible. For the man divined from his contemplation of those features the nature of the woman, all her complexities, and even her emotional fragilities. There came to him the well-known conviction, "It's she that I've always been seeking." At dawn, smothering under his mosquito net, with the din of Arab and Hindu, Masai and Swahili voices drifting in through his shutters, his first waking thought was of her.

He cut out the picture and kept it in his notebook.

It was there, against his breast, for many months. It traveled into still stranger places. It passed, through Gallaland and Abyssinia, into the country of the Blue Nile spearmen, across Darfur and Wadai, where the Emir's men rode out in the helmets and chain mail that their ancestors had copied from the Crusaders. It crossed the Sahara, skirting the strongholds of the Senussia Brotherhood, penetrating the wastes patrolled by the Tuaregs, ferocious camel riders whose mouths were always muffled in black bandages. It went north to the steppes of the Ziban, from which the tribe of the Ouled Nail scattered their feather-crowned dancing girls from Ceuta to Suez. And in the Atlas it entered the hill castles of Kabyles, whose unveiled, fierce-eyed, red-haired women, drenched with half a dozen perfumes, and clattering with silver, coral, turquoise and gold, were swifter than snakes with their knives.

At last it was yellow and crinkled, that picture of the fair unknown, which had become for him, in consequence of so many vivid reveries, like a living companion.

There were days when he forgot her. Then suddenly, under those desert constellations, he remembered her with a thrill. Or else, before the tent of some nomad sheikh, all at once she fluttered from the notebook to the silken carpet, on which girls with little brown feet had just been making their cuirasses of gold coins leap to the music of flageolets and drums.

And sometimes, though he had never before been superstitious, he felt that this picture was a sort of amulet. For twice when he was in danger, and there seemed to be small hope of his survival, there had come to him the fortifying thought, "Not yet, because I haven't found her in reality."

"Just a picture!" Lilla uttered, thinking of another picture that had been hardly less potent.

Yes, but when he returned home, after a dozen efforts and discouragements one day, merely by chance, he saw her alive, breathing. She whirled past in a limousine. She disappeared into the haze of a city street in summer. Whereupon he thought, "I was not mistaken; it's inevitable." He accepted the fatalism of his Arab friends, who believe that every man's destiny is fixed.

"He found her again?"

"Finally. There were difficulties."

"And they were happy ever after?"

He did not reply.

She looked over this magical garden toward the future, which now appeared like one of those deserts, but bereft of all enchantment, and covered with clouds that were not positive enough to rain. Then, gazing at the marble warrior that had seized the marble nymph, she said:

"I suppose it was you?"

"Yes," he assented, and pressed her hand to his lips.